MisPlaced

Recycling contamination is a multi-million dollar issue for cities. MisPlaced solves this issue by creating a frictionless waste sorting experience, leveraging machine learning and gamification.

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Inspiration

In Canada, recycling used to be sold to China, until the contamination ban in 2018.

Since then, contaminated recycling materials have been sent to Malaysia to be salvaged for pennies on the dollar. Malaysian companies take what they can, but leave tremendous amounts of waste in local communities, which results in landfill burning, polluted air and water, leading to an increase of cancer rates.

We want to educate the public about how to properly dispose of waste to avoid contamination of recycled goods, bring back revenue for cities, and prevent dumping in developing countries.

What it does

MisPlaced is a mobile app with a frictionless interface to help users sort their garbage. A user points their smartphone camera to their waste, and the app will instantly instruct the user where to dispose of said waste. By doing so, the user will be rewarded with points which can be redeemed for rewards provided by sponsoring companies like a free drink at Starbucks or a discount code at Nike.

How we built it

We built the front-end mobile app with React Native. We used image processing to optimize image recognition speed, and used Clarifai's general model to detect objects.

We built the back-end with Node.JS, Typescript and Apollo Graphql server. We also extracted data from the City of Toronto, and web scraped data from Markham and Mississauga.

Challenges we ran into

  • Performance issues with object recognition
  • Weird React Native Apollo client issue where there would be no response on a GraphQL API call unless you changed the URL.
  • Fuzzy search was the incorrect algorithm for keyword search
  • Object recognition is pretty meh at detecting the right object

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Found a "fix" to the React Native issue in a reasonable amount of time
  • The UI of our app looks pretty cool
  • Recycling contamination is a huge problem, and we genuinely believe a project like this can help reduce it, and hopefully eliminate the problems it brings.

What we learned

  • React native is awesome
  • GraphQL is awesome
  • Use these technologies more in the future!
  • You can deploy very fast in the cloud with Heroku

What's next for MisPlaced

Move MisPlaced from an iOS app to a more accessible device, hopefully something that costs less than $50. It can be attached to communal garbage bins at shopping malls, schools, and corporate campuses to be more effective at helping users sort their waste.

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